Around The World will be an occasional series in which we release the general restriction that this is a site that focuses upon the UK and Ireland. The aim is to focus on particularly interesting differences in practice from nation to nation; not to say that one site, or even one nation, has everything right and everyone else is wrong, but there might be some interesting lessons to consider. This time, there are two interesting tweaks on the adventure room format, both from sites in the province of Ontario within Canada.

De Code Canada, of Mississauga, is a site with three different exit rooms. (It also has a board game cafe, which is pretty cool!) An unusual gimmick is that you can choose to play any of those adventures at your choice of three levels of difficulty; the “guided” level offers generous hinting, the “challenger” level a single hint and the “insane” level offers no hints at all. The fastest solutions at the “insane” level of difficulty can earn placement on the monthly (wise!) Hall of Fame. Cute!

Adventure Rooms, of Kitchener, is a local version of an originally Swiss operation (also, like MazeBase, offering franchises). The game within their original exit room is a diamond heist, split into four phases, thus giving teams a sense of progression. However, they also offer sufficiently large parties the chance to split into two teams, playing a duel against each other; this splits the story covered in the hour into two half-hour sections. “Team A begins its adventure already at Phase 3, whereas Team B starts at Phase 1. Team A has to search for a hidden diamond and escape before Team B can capture them. After a break, the roles are reversed.” Highly thematic; I can seeing it working well, and competitively, in practice.

I’m not sure that every site would gain from such options or that this necessarily forms global best practice. Nevertheless, fun to think about and interesting to know.